The Soviets' Six Day War

- Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post May. 30th 2007

One of the great enigmas of the modern Middle East is why, 40 years ago
next week, the Six-Day War took place. Neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors
wanted or expected a fight in June 1967; the consensus view among historians
holds that the unwanted combat resulted from a sequence of accidents.

Enter Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, a wife-husband team, to challenge
the accident theory and offer a plausible explanation for the causes of
the war. As suggested by the title of their book, Foxbats
over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War
(Yale University Press), they argue that it originated in a scheme by the
Soviet politburo to eliminate Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona, and with
it the country's aspiration to develop nuclear weapons.

The text reads like the solution to a mystery, amassing information from
voluminous sources, guiding readers step-by-step through the argument, making
an intuitively compelling case that must be taken seriously. In summary,
it goes like this:

Moshe Sneh, an Israeli communist leader (and father of Ephraim Sneh, the
country's current deputy minister of defense) told the Soviet ambassador
in December 1965 that an advisor to the prime minister had informed him
about "Israel's intention to produce its own atomic bomb." Leonid
Brezhnev and his colleagues received this piece of information with dead
seriousness and decided - as did the Israelis about Iraq in 1981 and may
be doing about Iran in 2007 - to abort this process through air strikes.

Rather than do so directly, however, Moscow devised a complex scheme to
lure the Israelis into starting a war which would end with a Soviet attack
on Dimona. Militarily, the Kremlin prepared by surrounding Israel with an
armada of nuclear-armed forces in both the Mediterranean and Red seas, pre-positioning
mat riel on land, and training troops nearby with the expectation of using
them. Perhaps the most startling information in Foxbats over Dimona concerns
the detailed plans for Soviet troops to attack Israeli territory, and specifically
to bombard oil refineries and reservoirs, and reach out to Israeli Arabs.
No less eye-opening is to learn that Soviet photo-reconnaissance MiG-25s
(the "Foxbats" of the title) directly overflew the Dimona reactor
in May 1967.

Politically, the scheme consisted of fabricating intelligence reports about
Israeli threats to Syria, thereby goading the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian
forces to go on war-footing. As his Soviet masters then instructed, Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser moved his troops toward Israel, removed a United Nations
buffer force, and blockaded a key naval route to Israel - three steps that
together compelled the Israelis to move to a full-alert defense. Unable
to sustain this posture for long, they struck first, thereby, it appeared,
falling into the Soviet trap.

But then the Israel Defense Forces did something astonishing. Rather than
fight to a draw, as the Soviets expected, they quickly won what I have called
"the most overwhelming victory in the annals of warfare." Using
purely conventional means, they defeated three enemy Arab states in six
days, thereby preempting the planned Soviet invasion, which had to be scuttled.

Moscow's responsibility for the Six-Day War has disappeared

This fiasco made the elaborate Soviet scheme look inept, and Moscow understandably
decided to obscure its own role in engineering the war (its second major
strategic debacle of the decade - the attempt to place missiles in Cuba
having been the first). The cover-up succeeded so well that Moscow's responsibility
for the Six-Day War has disappeared from histories of the conflict. Thus,
a specialist on the war like Michael Oren, has coolly received the Ginor-Remez
thesis, saying he has not found "any documentary evidence to support"
it.

If Foxbats over Dimona is not the definitive word, it offers a viable,
exciting interpretation for others to chew on, with many implications. Today's
Arab-Israeli conflict, with its focus on the territories won in 1967, accompanied
by virulent anti-Semitism, results in large part from Kremlin decisions
made four decades ago. The whole exercise was for naught, as Israeli possession
of nuclear weapons had limited impact on the Soviet Union before it expired
in 1991. And, as the authors note , "21st century nostalgia for the
supposed stability of the Cold War is largely illusory."

Finally, 40 years later, where might things be had the Soviets' Six-Day
War not occurred? However bad circumstances are at present, they would presumably
be yet worse without that stunning Israeli victory.

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